From the course: Learning Amazon Web Services Lambda

Secure your AWS account - Amazon Web Services (AWS) Tutorial

From the course: Learning Amazon Web Services Lambda

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Secure your AWS account

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- [Instructor] When opening a new AWS account, prioritizing security should be your foremost concern. In this video, you'll learn what you need to do to secure your AWS account. When you first create an AWS account, a user is created at the same time. That user has complete access to all the AWS services and resources within that account. This user is called root user by default. You can access this root user by signing in with the email and password that you used to create the account. I strongly recommend that you don't use the root user. Instead, a best practice is to create and use an identity and access management, or IAM user. You'll learn more about IAM users in the next video. And then store in a secure place your root user credentials and use them only when you really, really need them. So why do you think you shouldn't use the root user? Imagine that you only have the root user and you use it for everything in your AWS management console. One day someone steals your credentials and change your password. Now, how can you recover your account? You don't want to face this scenario. It can be a hassle at best and a nightmare at worst. Since your credit card is linked to the account, any actions taken by the account thief will cause charges being billed to your card. Clearly, you don't want this to happen to you. The best steps that you can take to prevent this scenario is to create and use an admin user when you create an AWS account and store the root user credentials in a secure location. You will use this IAM admin user for everything you need. You can also create other users with fewer and specific privilege for your needs. And now what happens if someone steals the credentials for the IAM admin user? It's not problem at all. You open the safe where you stored the root credentials, log in with them, delete the IAM admin user and create a new IAM admin user. Now you have solved the problem and not much damage can be made. Next, let's dive into the details of IAM users.

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